elemental cloud computing
intentional cloud watching - by brenda michelson
On Friday, David Linthicum invited me on his cloud computing podcast to chat about what we heard, and didn’t hear, at the Cloud Connect conference. Naturally, our discussion wound its way to the connections of cloud computing, enterprise architecture, service-oriented architecture and data architecture.
Our podcast is Picking Apart Cloud Connect. Check it out.
Salesforce.com just added a powerful new tool to its Force.com development platform, a Visual Process Manager:
“The Visual Process Manager brings the power of Cloud Computing to Business Process Apps. Now you can visually draw any business process and instantly deploy it in the cloud with no code, no software and no infrastructure. The Visual Process Manager helps companies easily automate specific business process like call center scripting, sales quotes, and new employee on boarding.”
According to a post on TechCrunch:
“The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.
The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses more >>
Continuing the 100-day cloud watch, I’m working through my list of cloud computing surveys and papers. Given my background and primary readership, I’m starting with the enterprise architecture focused research. First up is the Forrester Report: EAs Are Seeing the Beginning of Cloud’s Impact On IT by Gene Leganza. The paper stemmed from a recent Forrester Leadership Board (FLB) teleconference:
“A recent Forrester Leadership Boards (FLB) teleconference, attended exclusively by Enterprise Architecture Council members, focused on the impact of cloud computing on EA and the traditional IT structure. We polled the 75 attendees, all enterprise architects, to determine their level of familiarity with cloud concepts and terminology, the degree to which these enterprise architects are engaging with the business and IT community to make decisions about cloud deployments, and the motivation for looking to the cloud for solutions.”
The report offers good information about why organizations are adopting cloud computing – include the different drivers of enterprise architecture and infrastructure professionals – along with enterprise architecture’s involvement in cloud computing adoption and implementation. I’d like to focus on this last point:
“Of the 54 session attendees who responded to this question, 20% said they were aware of no cloud deployments in their enterprise. Of the 43 who knew of cloud use, 26% said enterprise architects were involved in all cloud decisions, 58% said they were pulled in for guidance on possible cloud deployments some of the time, and 16% said their business or IT staff had licensed cloud services without EA’s involvement.”
Forrester surmises: “The ease of procuring cloud resources makes it likely that business project sponsors or IT development and support staff will acquire cloud services without engaging the standard technology governance processes where architects typically become engaged.”. At the Gartner AADI conference, Eric Knipp referred to this phenomenon as the rise of “Citizen Development”.
In the report, Leganza suggests that instead of “falling victim to an end run by the business”, enterprise architects need to embrace the role of business advisor. Specifically, Leganza recommends:
“Get proficient in cloud-related issues and terminology. If IT in general and architects in particular are to position themselves as trusted advisors to the business — thus playing a role in the IT-to-BT transition rather than being a victim of it — architects should be the ones to recommend cloud services when they are appropriate rather than let the business position cloud as a way to get IT services without the IT department. To be in a position to advocate cloud-based solutions, architects must have a thorough understanding of the facts, subtleties, hype, and misinformation surrounding cloud computing, and they must develop a practical model for which of their workloads are appropriate for the cloud and which must be deployed internally…”
“Look for ways to improve IT services with cloud-based offerings. Work with subject matter experts in infrastructure and application engineering to see where cloud-based services can provide hosted solutions that are more cost-effective and flexible than in-house scenarios without introducing undue risk…"
“Consider cloud services when brainstorming business solutions. Create a cloud cheat sheet — your own customized guide listing criteria that identify a workload appropriate for the cloud — for use in early-stage architecture reviews or when discussing possible solutions to business problems. Any flexible and cost-effective hosting arrangement that does not introduce risk can translate to technology-enhanced business capabilities with no increased support burden on internal IT, which is a win-win for both IT and its business stakeholders.”
“Provide a context for solution decisions with an integrated view of architecture. …Providing an easy-to-understand high-level graphical view of business, information, and applications — such as in a capability map — can enable informed discussions about possible cloud-based solutions that don’t ignore integration requirements.”
Todd Biske, a seasoned enterprise architect and renowned SOA Governance expert, also speaks to the EA as Business Advisor in a recent post.
Next week, I’m attending Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Integration Conference (AADI) in Vegas. I’ll be splitting my time amongst SOA, Cloud Computing and Event Processing sessions. I haven’t built my agenda yet, but I’ll definitely be at the SOA Consortium end-user panels on Cloud Computing Use Cases and SOA Success Stories.
When possible, I’ll be blogging and tweeting from the sessions. The conference twitter hashtag is #gartneraadi.
If you are attending and want to connect on SOA, Cloud Computing, SOA & Cloud Computing and/or Event Processing, please send me an email, or ping me on Twitter.
In February, as I began my cloud watching in earnest, I wrote the following:
“Only time will tell if my cloud watching is attention well spent. If the cloud is indeed "the future of the Internet", then yes. If the cloud is merely a repackaging of everything that we already do, then no. Most likely, the cloud’s promise falls somewhere in between, landing closer to the future than the past.”
Since then, of course, I’ve launched Elemental Cloud Computing, which some have interpreted as a now bullish position on cloud computing. That would be a misinterpretation. more >>
Given my longstanding background in SOA and my current work in Cloud Computing, I’m often asked how the two complement each other, particularly from the business benefit perspective. Briefly, here are my thoughts and observations.
From the SOA Side
The immediate benefit of combining SOA and Cloud Computing is time. Reaching out to the cloud for business or technology capabilities, allows SOA initiatives to compress time to value.
In the longer term, the benefits include improved collaboration, customer satisfaction and business growth. By offering SOA based business capabilities to the cloud, businesses can improve interactions with business partners and existing customers, and/or generate new revenue streams.
From the Cloud Side
The immediate benefit of cloud computing is financial. more >>
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